SAN FRANCISCO, CA – San Francisco’s ongoing struggle with homelessness and drug addiction is not, at its core, a crisis of resources or even strategy — it is a crisis of political will.
That’s the argument laid out by former San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston in a searing blog post published this week, titled “Why San Francisco Doesn’t Solve Its Homelessness & Drug Problems.”
According to Preston, the city’s leaders have knowingly abandoned meaningful solutions in favor of a politically expedient cycle of displacement and punishment.
The post is an insider’s account of how what Preston calls the “punishment industrial complex” has overtaken San Francisco’s public health and housing priorities. The core problem, he writes, is that politicians gain more from performing action than solving problems. “Sweeps are the gift that keeps giving,” he argues, describing how unhoused people are pushed from one block to another — not to get them services or shelter, but to calm constituent complaints and give politicians an easy win.
In Preston’s view, San Francisco’s leadership — Democratic in name but increasingly conservative in policy — has embraced a strategy that centers public comfort over public health, optics over outcomes, and displacement over dignity.
“So if the goal is to house people and end the cycle for good, the politician has completely failed. But if the goal is to create the appearance of success and win support, the strategy is very effective,” Preston writes.
Perhaps the clearest example of this cynical playbook is what unfolded at Jefferson Square in the Western Addition earlier this year. According to Preston, it was a manufactured crisis engineered by sweeps elsewhere in the city.
In January, after Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration began a wave of sweeps in the Tenderloin and SoMa, people displaced from those neighborhoods ended up in the park. By February, the scene had become chaotic, and residents began to complain.
Mayor Lurie and the newly-elected supervisor for the district dispatched police to raid the park. Eighty-four people were arrested. Media headlines hailed it as a cleanup victory.
But according to Preston, “The politicians didn’t solve anything, they just had a bunch of people arrested for using drugs, who upon release moved on to the next location.”
Meanwhile, the arrests and sweeps further destabilized people already struggling with addiction and housing insecurity.
“The entire costly PR stunt makes it more likely those experiencing homelessness and addiction will overdose, lose the few possessions they have, experience trauma, and thereby stay homeless longer,” Preston wrote.
This displacement tactic is no accident. In a recent hearing, SFPD Commander Derrick Lew openly admitted to the Board of Supervisors that “success in that area will clearly mean that there’s some displacement.”
Preston argues that San Francisco’s homelessness and behavioral health strategies have drifted dramatically from their original goals. During his early years in office, the stated mission of street outreach teams was to connect people to housing, treatment and care.
But under Mayor London Breed and now Mayor Lurie, that mission has been replaced with a singular focus on what’s euphemistically called “quality of life” — which, in practice, means appeasing housed residents.
He points to the Department of Public Health, once a champion of overdose prevention and harm reduction, now sidelining its own commitments. “DPH has retreated on its advocacy for overdose prevention sites, and removed concerns about racist outcomes from policing strategies from its overdose prevention plan,” Preston notes.
This shift in mission is not a bureaucratic accident — it is a political calculation. As Preston sees it, the dominant narrative is no longer one of solving a humanitarian crisis but managing a nuisance.
The political ecosystem that sustains this approach is well-funded, coordinated and increasingly right-wing in tone, Preston warns. “The punishment industrial complex, led by the right wing and fully supported by compliant SF Democrats, is an exceedingly well-funded network… Their goal is to blame the poor, fearmonger, troll and smear advocates for the vulnerable, and promote conservative ‘law and order’ politicians.”
This network has redefined public disorder not as a social problem to be solved but as a visual blight to be managed. In this worldview, the crisis is not that people are unhoused or dying from fentanyl overdoses — it’s that housed residents have to see it.
Political scientist Lincoln Mitchell underscored this dynamic in a recent column, writing: “It is now increasingly apparent that for Lurie, addressing the perception of disorder was a higher policy priority than helping people who are homeless or wrestling with substance abuse.”
Preston echoes this sentiment, calling out a political culture that sees suffering itself as less urgent than the discomfort it causes others. “Instead of addressing the roots of trauma caused by living on the streets,” he writes, “our current leaders focus on tents, trash, public urination or defecation, or people self-medicating with drugs or experiencing a mental health crisis.”
The way out of this political theater, Preston argues, is to center the needs of those who are suffering — not those who are merely inconvenienced. But that shift is unlikely to come from the top down, at least under the city’s current leadership. “Those most vulnerable often do not vote. Nor is their perspective shared in the corporate media,” Preston observes.
And therein lies the political failure: the people most in need of bold public policy — those living on the street or addicted to dangerous drugs — are the least empowered to shape it. Until that changes, Preston warns, San Francisco will keep cycling through the same hollow responses, pretending to act while nothing changes.
“If leaders do not champion real solutions to homelessness and drug addiction,” he concludes, “we are guaranteed to continue failing to solve these crises.”
